Free energy

Fancy analogy for understanding cognition

2011-11-27 – 2020-12-01
Maybe related 🤷:

Not “free as in speech” or “free as in beer”, nor “free energy” in the sense of perpetual motion machines, zero point energy or pills that turn your water into petroleum, but rather a particular mathematical object that pops up in variational Bayes inference and in wacky theories of cognition.

In variational Bayes

Variational Bayes inference is a formalism for learning, borrowing bits from statistical mechanics and graphical models.

Free energy shows up in variational Bayes as the negative of the ELBO, the evidence lower bound, which AFAICT means that this term is defined by the Kullback-Leibler divergence. Presumably an analogous term would pop up in non KL approximation.

As a model for cognition

This term, with the same (?) definition appears to pop up in a “free energy principle” where it is instrumental as a unifying concept for learning systems such as brains.

Here is the most compact version I could find:

The free energy principle (FEP) claims that self-organization in biological agents is driven by variational free energy (FE) minimization in a generative probabilistic model of the agent’s environment.

The chief pusher of this wheelbarrow appears to be Karl Friston.

He starts his Nature Reviews Neuroscience piece with this statement of the principle:

The free-energy principle says that any self-organizing system that is at equilibrium with its environment must minimize its free energy.

Is that “must” in

  • the sense of moral obligation, or is it
  • a testable conservation law of some kind?

If the latter, self-organising in what sense? What type of equilibrium? For which definition of the free energy? What is our chief experimental evidence for this hypothesis?

I think it means that any right thinking brain, seeking to avoid the vice of slothful and decadent perception after the manner of foreigners and compulsive masturbators, would do well to seek to maximise its free energy before partaking of a stimulating and refreshing physical recreation such as a game of cricket.

What does this mean, precisely? There are dozens of Friston papers with minor variations on the theme and it is not clear where to start. I would recommend the clearer explanation in Millidge, Tschantz, and Buckley (2020) which summarises many of them and provides smoe extensions.

See also: Exergy, Landauer’s Principle, the Slate Star Codex Friston dogpile, based on an exposition by Wolfgang Schwarz.

References

Bengio, Yoshua. 2009. Learning Deep Architectures for AI. Vol. 2. https://doi.org/10.1561/2200000006.
Castellani, Tommaso, and Andrea Cavagna. 2005. “Spin-Glass Theory for Pedestrians.” Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment 2005 (05): P05012. https://doi.org/10.1088/1742-5468/2005/05/P05012.
Frey, B. J., and Nebojsa Jojic. 2005. “A Comparison of Algorithms for Inference and Learning in Probabilistic Graphical Models.” IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 27 (9): 1392–1416. https://doi.org/10.1109/TPAMI.2005.169.
Friston, Karl. 2010. “The Free-Energy Principle: A Unified Brain Theory?” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 11 (2): 127. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn2787.
———. 2013. “Life as We Know It.” Journal of The Royal Society Interface 10 (86). https://doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2013.0475.
Geirhos, Robert, Jörn-Henrik Jacobsen, Claudio Michaelis, Richard Zemel, Wieland Brendel, Matthias Bethge, and Felix A. Wichmann. 2020. “Shortcut Learning in Deep Neural Networks.” April 16, 2020. http://arxiv.org/abs/2004.07780.
Jordan, Michael I., Zoubin Ghahramani, Tommi S. Jaakkola, and Lawrence K. Saul. 1999. “An Introduction to Variational Methods for Graphical Models.” Machine Learning 37 (2): 183–233. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1007665907178.
Jordan, Michael I., and Yair Weiss. 2002. “Probabilistic Inference in Graphical Models.” Handbook of Neural Networks and Brain Theory. http://mlg.eng.cam.ac.uk/zoubin/course03/hbtnn2e-I.pdf.
LeCun, Yann, Sumit Chopra, Raia Hadsell, M. Ranzato, and F. Huang. 2006. “A Tutorial on Energy-Based Learning.” Predicting Structured Data. http://classes.soe.ucsc.edu/cmps290c/Spring12/lect/9/energytut.pdf.
Millidge, Beren, Alexander Tschantz, and Christopher L. Buckley. 2020. “Whence the Expected Free Energy?” September 28, 2020. http://arxiv.org/abs/2004.08128.
Montanari, Andrea. 2011. “Lecture Notes for Stat 375 Inference in Graphical Models.” http://www.stanford.edu/~montanar/TEACHING/Stat375/handouts/notes_stat375_1.pdf.
Wainwright, Martin J., and Michael I. Jordan. 2008. Graphical Models, Exponential Families, and Variational Inference. Vol. 1. Foundations and Trends® in Machine Learning. Now Publishers. https://doi.org/10.1561/2200000001.
Wainwright, Martin, and Michael I Jordan. 2005. “A Variational Principle for Graphical Models.” In New Directions in Statistical Signal Processing. Vol. 155. MIT Press.
Wang, Chaohui, Nikos Komodakis, and Nikos Paragios. 2013. “Markov Random Field Modeling, Inference & Learning in Computer Vision & Image Understanding: A Survey.” Computer Vision and Image Understanding 117 (11): 1610–27. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cviu.2013.07.004.
Williams, Daniel. 2020. “Predictive Coding and Thought.” Synthese 197 (4): 1749–75. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-1768-x.
Xing, Eric P., Michael I. Jordan, and Stuart Russell. 2003. “A Generalized Mean Field Algorithm for Variational Inference in Exponential Families.” In Proceedings of the Nineteenth Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, 583–91. UAI’03. San Francisco, CA, USA: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc. http://arxiv.org/abs/1212.2512.
Yedidia, J. S., W. T. Freeman, and Y. Weiss. 2003. “Understanding Belief Propagation and Its Generalizations.” In Exploring Artificial Intelligence in the New Millennium, edited by G. Lakemeyer and B. Nebel, 239–36. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers. http://www.merl.com/publications/TR2001-22.
Yedidia, Jonathan S., W. T. Freeman, and Y. Weiss. 2005. “Constructing Free-Energy Approximations and Generalized Belief Propagation Algorithms.” IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 51 (7): 2282–312. https://doi.org/10.1109/TIT.2005.850085.